The War in the Ukraine

Temstar

Brigadier
Registered Member
Screenshot 2025-10-24 134329.jpg
Is there someone knowledgeable about jet RC planes that can speak about this little turbojet SW800Pro? How come both US techbro turned MIC and Russian MIC are buying it to fit them into weapons? Is there some combination of specs that make this particular make attractive?

From a cursory search on alibaba it seems to be popular in RC hobby and is on the larger end of hobby grade turbojet, but is there anything else to it?

Here's the company website and specs:
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It's the second largest engine the company makes, there's one larger one that has 120kg of thrust compared to this at 80kg.
 
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CaribouTruth

Junior Member
Registered Member
View attachment 163135
Is there someone knowledgeable about jet RC planes that can speak about this little turbojet SW800Pro? How come both US techbro turned MIC and Russian MIC are buying it to fit them into weapons? Is there some combination of specs that make this particular make attractive?
Much of it is simply down to tech parity, production ability/volume, lead times and direct to consumer sales.

Chinese turbojets are cheaper than western alternatives, they have similar technological levels (specific fuel consumption, thrust, pumps, digital ecus etc etc) at almost half the cost in some cases. They are sold direct to customer instead of through things like dealerships lol, the companies have ability to churn out engines because they have automated production facilities so bulk orders are even better with Chinese manufacturers. They have basically no lead times.

Writing all this down you just notice that its all the same industrial and manufacturing advantage China has in every other industry applied to turbojets.
 

Mmmeeeto

Junior Member
Registered Member
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Atomicfrog

Major
Registered Member
Ukrainians used Patriot and Iris T missile to shoot down (likely) Chinese Sw800 engine enhanced KABs, a very extreme cost assymetry.

This is no doubt a gamechanger
It's also an Ukrainian/Nato costly stockpiles that's becoming a rarity used against another tinkered cheap weapon system with no end in sight.
 
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plawolf

Lieutenant General
New variant of the UMPK kit with a more streamlined design and a booster rocket, giving it a claimed range of 200km


View attachment 162993

It actually makes me wonder just how much extra weight it would need to add a spine to connect the wing kit to the turbofan engine section, a release mechanism to separate the wing kit from the bomb (mini gelatines to cut the steel straps holding the bomb should suffice) and a mini parachute. You can add an IFF beacon as well if you want to be extra safe and future proof).

This way, you basically turn the expendable wing kit into a reusable drone that aims the bomb at the target co-ordinates, separates and flys back to a predetermined friendly controlled area and deploy parachute to be recovered and used again.

The trade offs will be increased unit cost and weight, as well as reduced range if you want to recover the glide kit. But it could add up to a significant amount of savings cumulatively, as well as give you potentially additional use options. For example, you could swap the FAB out for a cluster munitions dispenser and drop cluster bombs along a trench/tree line rather than just hit a single point with a FAB.

This is the sort of thing that will have minimal demand during peace time, but something that becomes a hell of a lot more attractive in a war economy situation where you need to stretch finite resources as far as you can.
 

Temstar

Brigadier
Registered Member



Ukrainians used Patriot or Iris T missiles to shoot down (likely) Chinese Sw800 engine enhanced FABs, a very extreme cost assymetry.

This is no doubt a gamechanger
Not only were three million dollar+ surface to air missiles fired at powered UMPK kits worth 30k + an iron bomb, they failed to intercept the 4th and it penetrated the GBAD?
 

Temstar

Brigadier
Registered Member
It actually makes me wonder just how much extra weight it would need to add a spine to connect the wing kit to the turbofan engine section, a release mechanism to separate the wing kit from the bomb (mini gelatines to cut the steel straps holding the bomb should suffice) and a mini parachute. You can add an IFF beacon as well if you want to be extra safe and future proof).

This way, you basically turn the expendable wing kit into a reusable drone that aims the bomb at the target co-ordinates, separates and flys back to a predetermined friendly controlled area and deploy parachute to be recovered and used again.

The trade offs will be increased unit cost and weight, as well as reduced range if you want to recover the glide kit. But it could add up to a significant amount of savings cumulatively, as well as give you potentially additional use options. For example, you could swap the FAB out for a cluster munitions dispenser and drop cluster bombs along a trench/tree line rather than just hit a single point with a FAB.

This is the sort of thing that will have minimal demand during peace time, but something that becomes a hell of a lot more attractive in a war economy situation where you need to stretch finite resources as far as you can.
You would have to get this glide kit to drop its bomb at low altitude and almost right on top of its target, or maybe even dive bomb or else the accuracy would be worse than WW2 era day time bombing with Norden bombsight. Raison d'etre for glide kit is they turn iron bombs into PGM by guiding it in all the way.

But on the other hand it may be worth experimenting, once the bomb is dropped the rest of the kit is very light and wouldn't take that much fuel to climb back to cruising altitude and fly back to friendly lines.

I would think a better alternative is to talk to Swiwin to get them to make a turbojet more fitted to UMPK requirement. SW800Pro has a service period of 25 hours, which probably works great for people who take their RC jet plane out on the weekend and fly them for an hour or two each time. But for UMPK use when you only need it to work for say less than 1 hour its probably overbuilt.
 
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vincent

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Moderator - World Affairs
I would think a better alternative is to talk to Swiwin to get them to make a turbojet more fitted to UMPK requirement. SW800Pro has a service period of 25 hours, which probably works great for people who take their RC jet plane out on the weekend and fly them for an hour or two each time. But for UMPK use when you only need it to work for say less than 1 hour its probably overbuilt.
Since Russians do’t have to worry about service life, Swiwin can tune the SW800Pro to run much hotter, as long as they can guarantee say 90% of the up tuned engines can run for an hour without failing.
 

gelgoog

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Ukrainians used Patriot or Iris T missiles to shoot down (likely) Chinese Sw800 engine enhanced FABs, a very extreme cost assymetry.

This is no doubt a gamechanger
Probably lessons learned from Iran again.
Iran also has this incredibly low cost cruise missile with a similar cloned Czech engine.

You would have to get this glide kit to drop its bomb at low altitude and almost right on top of its target, or maybe even dive bomb or else the accuracy would be worse than WW2 era day time bombing with Norden bombsight. Raison d'etre for glide kit is they turn iron bombs into PGM by guiding it in all the way.
He basically wants a cheap bomber drone.

But on the other hand it may be worth experimenting, once the bomb is dropped the rest of the kit is very light and wouldn't take that much fuel to climb back to cruising altitude and fly back to friendly lines.
Maybe.

I would think a better alternative is to talk to Swiwin to get them to make a turbojet more fitted to UMPK requirement. SW800Pro has a service period of 25 hours, which probably works great for people who take their RC jet plane out on the weekend and fly them for an hour or two each time. But for UMPK use when you only need it to work for say less than 1 hour its probably overbuilt.
Russia has several programs to make its own cheap small jet engines. They just have not hit mass production yet.
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